LOL because he says so. I used to participate in the IEEE video conference series in the 90s and they were pretty awesome. And reasonably well attended, although expensive.

As for the lack of mentors the original problem of fire all the old expensive engineers and only hire cheap inexperienced ones means the theoretical mentors will have plenty of time for their mentoring duty; they'll be unemployed. Or the purpose of this is to get them jobs; in which case they'll be mentoring the kids at work instead of at the hackerspace?

A huge part of engineering unfortunately involves some expensive gear. As ham radio guys have known for decades, stuff thats a generation or two old does exactly the same job as cutting edge for about 1/1000th the cost. My POS oscilloscope at home is about two generations out of date, luckily I don't have the skill or other gear to do cutting edge work from the 90s so I'm all good. Thats just EE which is fairly easy to do at home... don't get me started on my previous career plan of ChemEng. Anyway a decent hackerspace Can help, although in my chosen fields of electronics and machining I generally have better gear at home than any hackerspace has (hey, they pay us well in tech, non-computer hardware doesn't depreciate as fast as computer video cards, and I'm not a kid anymore so spend a grand a year on gear and none of it goes obsolete and by the time you're "old" you have quite a basement indeed)

One oddity is the only two engineering classes they mention by name are Android and IOS and those are typically code monkey topics, not say, MechEng or CivEng. I would think theoretical MechEng would be pretty cheap to teach as would CivEng.